New Mexican farmers struggle to stay on the landhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/new-mexican-farmers-struggle-to-stay-on-the-land
Can a tax break keep New Mexico’s struggling farmers from selling out?Louis Romero has been through two knee replacements, a heart attack and a bout with cancer. At 73, he's not up for farm chores any more.

Romero and his wife, Emily, live on 5 acres just north of Taos, New Mexico, that were once part of a larger family farm. Emily and her three sisters inherited the land from their dad, who worked as a school bus driver mornings and afternoons and dedicated the rest of his time to the farm.

“I have such an emotional tie to this land,” Emily Romero says, tears welling up behind her wire-frame glasses as she recalls endless hours spent shucking peas and churning butter.

The Romeros continued to run cattle on their property until they were forced to sell the herd during a drought a decade ago. Their kids have shown no interest in working the land. Some can't even stand the smell of fresh manure. As a result, the land has sat idle for years.

Emily and Louis Romero own about 5 acres just north of Taos that was once part of a much larger family farm. The Romeros and hundreds of other Taos County landowners are facing a huge spike in property taxes because the land is no longer being used for agriculture. An effort is underway to give a tax break to those who don’t develop their land, leaving it open for future generations of farmers.

Katharine Egli/The Taos News

For the Romeros and other families, state tax law makes idling land an expensive proposition. Because the family's property was once used for agriculture, it was one of about 6,000 parcels that enjoyed a longtime property tax break. But in 2013, the county began cracking down. The assessor's office hired a team to inspect fields and irrigation ditches, property by property, for signs of farming activity. By the end of 2015, they found that more than half of the 1,000 parcels inspected were not in production.

When an old family loses ag status, the county adjusts their property value and corresponding tax to the market rate, which has been inflated by a wave of affluent retirees and second homeowners. The result for many landowners has been a sudden and often astronomical spike in taxes. For example, in the desirable Des Montes area — which is now home to notable property owners like actress Julia Roberts and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld —one parcel that lost ag status saw its yearly tax go from $576 a year to over $3,000. On average, properties that lost ag status in 2014 saw their tax bills go up 143-fold.

As the reassessment continues, many locals fear that jacking up taxes on arable land will force longtime owners off their land. If that land, once sold, is subsequently developed rather than farmed, it could spell the end of a centuries-old farming tradition that's at the center of the region's cultural identity.

The trend isn't unique to New Mexico. Across the West, old farm and ranch owners have been pushed out as development overtakes rural areas. But some states have taken steps to protect farmland — even unproductive properties —from development. Whether New Mexico can learn from other Western states and adopt a similar strategy may determine the fate of families like the Romeros — and the future of agriculture in Taos County.

It's undeniable that agriculture in Taos County is nowhere as vibrant as it once was. But for those who hope to see a widespread resurgence, the protection of agricultural land for future use is a top priority.

In 2015, Allison co-authored a report with Colorado State University that compared tax law across the Intermountain West. The report concluded that offering tax incentives for preserving open space — not just active farms —could lead to more sustainable agriculture and prevent the kind of tax crisis facing Taoseños.

“The greatest threat to agriculture right now is the loss of land to development,” Allison says, noting that it's not only the real estate but the water rights that are being sold off piecemeal. “By creating an open space option, we hold some of that land in reserve for future generations of farmers.”

For inspiration, some in northern New Mexico are looking to states like Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Texas and Washington, which all have some kind of open space protection written into their tax laws. Allison points to Washington, which passed a law in 1970 that gave a tax break not just to active farms, but to parcels of open space as well. Under the Open Space Taxation Act, an owner makes a formal application with their county commission or town council asking for an open space classification. Inspectors grade a property using 25 separate categories that include attributes like aquifer protection, wildlife habitat, and allowing public access.

If approved, the land can be valued as low as land that meets the standards of active agricultural land — sometimes just $1 an acre. The owner must agree to keep the land undeveloped for at least 10 years, or face back taxes and an additional penalty.

Bill Bernstein oversees the open space program for Washington's King County, which includes Seattle and more rural areas to the east. Bernstein says he's seeing a wave of aging farmers looking to the open space program as a way to hang on to their land in the face of mounting pressure to develop or sell out.

“It's a fallback that gives some flexibility for these multi-generational owners,” says Bernstein. He adds that it's not uncommon for a farm to go out of production and enter the open space program, then resume operations when another family member steps in or a new owner takes over. Farm advocates and conservationists in Taos think that model would work well in New Mexico. “It would give people some breathing room,” says Kristina Ortez de Jones, executive director of the Taos Land Trust and member of a local group that's trying to revive the county's agriculture. “We need that tool in a community like ours, which is so poor but has really high property values.”

To protect local agricultural acres, Lesli Allison of the Western LandownersAlliance is proposing the “ New Mexico Land and Resource Reserve” that would create a new tax category for open space around the state. Although they haven't decided on firm numbers yet, Allison says taxes for open space properties would be higher than taxes for active farms, but significantly lower than market rate. Qualifying properties must also have agricultural water rights, or have been designated as agricultural within the last three years. Owners would be required to maintain existing irrigation infrastructure and keep the land free of noxious weeds. If a property were pulled out of the program for development, the owner would pay a penalty.

If and when such a bill is introduced, it's likely to be controversial. Allison says the most common critique is that giving fallow farmland a tax break is akin to offering complacent landowners a free ride. There are also worries that developers could find loopholes to shelter themselves from higher taxes.

]]>No publisherSmall towns, big changeAgricultureNew MexicoEconomyGrowth & Sustainability2016/09/06 11:40:00 GMT-6ArticleRural hospitals pool their resources to survivehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/48.15/rural-hospitals-pool-their-resources-to-survive
A group of ten New Mexico hospitals is making a go of it in tough times.Guadalupe County Hospital in Santa Rosa is home to the only emergency room between Albuquerque and Tucumcari — a 173-mile stretch of Interstate 40 that spans the lonely eastern half of New Mexico. The small city is home to fewer than 3,000 people, making it the largest town in a county with fewer than 5,000 residents. More than a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line.

For Guadalupe County’s isolated and scattered populace, the hospital plays a critical role.

“If this hospital closes, my kids have nowhere to go,” says Christina Campos, the hospital’s CEO. “My neighbors have nowhere to go. My employees have nowhere to go.” In New Mexico, a remote hospital struggling to serve a poor community is a common scenario. According to federal data, one-third of the state’s population lived in “Health Professional Shortage Areas” in 2010. Thirty-one of New Mexico’s 33 counties faced shortages.

Like most rural hospitals in the state, Guadalupe County has had to fight to get by. Many of its patients rely on government health insurance, which often doesn’t cover the hospital’s costs, let alone provide a profit. That situation is only expected to get worse as the state faces a $417 million Medicaid shortfall.

At the same time, the needs are overwhelming: New Mexico often finds itself near the bottom of nationwide lists related to health and well-being. America’s Health Rankings, for instance, placed it 37th in 2015, partly due to high rates of diabetes, drug deaths and children living in poverty.

“Generally, the purpose of these hospital networks is to focus on helping (hospitals) thrive. But in the case of New Mexico, it’s to survive.”

To better cope with those challenges, Guadalupe County Hospital is teaming up with other small hospitals to share information, hire experts and offer advice on how to navigate an increasingly uncertain industry. “We’re all facing the same thing,” Campos says.

In 2014, Santa Rosa and five other hospitals founded the New Mexico Rural Hospital Network, an initiative intended to improve cooperation — and, with it, fiscal health — among small hospitals scattered across the state. The network now contains 10 members, including Holy Cross Hospital in Taos.

“All of our hospitals are the only hospital in their town, sometimes even in their whole county or beyond,” Stephen Stoddard, the network’s executive director, says.

The group’s creation was aided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which regularly funds rural hospital networks to improve efficiency, expand access and improve quality of care. In its most recent round of funding two years ago, the agency awarded a total of $11.6 million to 39 networks nationwide, from Alaska to Maine. The New Mexico network received a $300,000 grant.

“Generally, the purpose of these hospital networks is to focus on helping them thrive,” Stoddard says. “But in the case of New Mexico, it’s to survive.”

In some cases, that means creating economies of scale: New Mexico’s member hospitals have entered into group purchasing agreements, for example, lowering prices on bulk purchases for necessities like bandages and bedpans. Guadalupe County Hospital has already cut its annual supply costs by nearly one-third, from $100,000 to $70,000.

Steve Rozenboom, CFO at Holy Cross Hospital in Taos, has participated in 'peer committee' meetings with others doing the same job and small hospitals across the state. Staff members say these quarterly meetings are a great way to share good ideas.

Katherine Egli

Before the network’s creation, says Campos, the CEO at Guadalupe County, “If you were a medical records office manager, you were the only one you knew. Now you have nine others that you can call on.”

That might sound simple. And obvious. But Stoddard explains that the staff of a small rural hospital is more likely to suffer from professional isolation that can hurt performance and stifle innovation. And without a formal network, conversations that inspire learning and creativity — and, in turn, lead to cost savings — usually don’t happen.

That was true for Leslie Sanchez, who oversees medical records at Guadalupe County Hospital and has been part of the network’s committee meetings for about a year. “It was just nice to be able to hear their experiences and their problems and realize, ‘Wow, I’m not the only one going crazy,’ ” Sanchez says.

Sanchez learned, for example, that another records clerk in Lovington had experienced a problem she was dealing with: doctors who failed to do paperwork. That clerk had developed a series of emails to prompt doctors to complete it. It was a simple approach, but it was more structured, Sanchez says. And it works much better than her strategy of gentle nagging.

The network has also hired its own specialist to analyze contracts with insurance companies to ensure that terms are fair and comparable to other hospitals — expertise that would be hard for any one of these hospitals to afford on their own.

Furthermore, the network is working with the University of New Mexico to draw more medical students to do rotations in rural hospitals. Studies have found that attracting medical students to small hospitals makes it easier to hire them later, when they finish school. So the network gives these small facilities more to offer them, Stoddard says.

For all the group’s accomplishments, its success remains tenuous. It’s not clear whether cooperation and bulk purchasing will be enough to keep small hospitals viable. But network members say it can’t hurt. If the network can prove its worth to its members, they might be willing to shell out more money or find funding elsewhere — and face these challenges as a group, rather than going it alone.

]]>No publisherPublic healthCommunitiesEconomyNew MexicoSmall towns, big change2016/09/05 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleInside a small-town addict’s struggle to get cleanhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/suboxone-treatment-new-mexico-opioid-epidemic
Could an innovative new program help turn the tide on opioid addication in rural New Mexico?For nine years, Danny Chavez tumbled through a vicious cycle of hospital beds, jail stints, rehab programs, and months in prison. Amid the turmoil he lost his job, his family's trust and most of what he loved in life.

But today, Chavez, 39, is putting the pieces back together, thanks largely to a treatment program in Questa that combines medical care and group therapy.

New Mexico and Taos County are in the midst of an opioid epidemic that shows no signs of relenting. Between 2010 and 2014, 47 people died of drug overdoses in Taos County. The county's overdose rate is well above the state and national averages.

In Northern New Mexico, many communities lack the resources to meet the opioid fight head on. Social problems endemic to rural New Mexico ― poverty, domestic violence, and a lack of access to adequate health care ― contribute to rampant drug use.

That's why some experts see hope in a drug treatment program that addresses not only the addiction, but its causes as well. For almost a year, Dr. Gina Perez-Baron ― a feisty general practitioner at the Questa Health Center ― has used Suboxone to stabilize opioid addicts. When properly prescribed, Suboxone relieves cravings and withdrawal symptoms without giving patients a potent high.

But Suboxone is only the first step in an intense treatment regimen in which a doctor and a therapist work side-by-side. By taking on deep-seated issues like depression, anxiety and chronic pain ― conditions that can trigger relapse ― Perez-Baron says patients have a chance at real, long-term recovery.

“If you want your life back,” she says, “you'll get it back here.”

Chavez never planned on being a junkie. He drank, smoked a little weed and was arrested a few times as a young man. But it wasn't until he turned 30 that he really tasted addiction.

In 2007, Chavez (not his real name) felt a sudden intense pain in his abdomen. Doctors eventually diagnosed it as pancreatitis — an inflammation of pancreas that is often treated with pain medication. At the time, Chavez says he hated pills. He wouldn't even take Tylenol for a headache. But when he got to the hospital, nurses hooked him up to a morphine drip to numb his throbbing gut. The feeling was euphoric.

“I still was in pain, but I could breath,” Chavez says. “I had relief.”

When he left the hospital, doctors put Chavez on a prescription for painkillers. He was responsible and took his recommended dose. But over time, as he built a tolerance, the effects started wearing off sooner. So he took more. If he burned through his monthly prescription early, his friends always had a couple extra. There's always someone with a few pills. Always. “This town is drowning in them,” Chavez says.

Danny Chavez says he’s been able to hold down a stead job, pay off debts and regain the trust of his parents after seven months in Questa’s addiction treatment program. For recovering addicts like Chavez, the program offers a safe place to address the root causes of addiction. ’It’s my sanctuary,’ he says.

Because sharing pills was so casual, so common, Chavez still felt in control. But the addiction was insidious. It came on in slow degrees. At some point, it became too big to manage. “Your hunger for things goes up and up,” Chavez says. “I started to need them.”

To satisfy that need, Chavez says he sacrificed everything he loved in my life. He took advantage of friends and family, borrowing money with no intention of paying it back. He lost a good job. He stopping going to the mountains. And he stole.

In 2011, Chavez reached a breaking point. He burglarized a local business to pay for more pills, and he got caught. Facing three felony charges, Chavez was released on bond and forced to enroll in a 120-day rehab program in Española. Chavez says the program didn't help much, though he admits he wasn't ready to get clean. He was just going through the motions. He relapsed almost immediately after leaving.

“I didn't feel like I was working on my sobriety one bit,” Chavez says. “I didn't feel like I wanted to be different. Be better.” In 2013, he relapsed soon after departing yet another rehab program. Officers found Chavez drunk. He was arrested and tested positive for opiates.

“[Chavez] has been given ample opportunity by the court to make behavioral modifications yet has failed to do so,” his parole officer wrote in a court filing. “A sentence to [prison] will provide just punishment for his crime and several violations of probation.” The judge agreed. Chavez spent the remainder of his sentence in the state penitentiary. Chavez says he kept to himself in prison. The withdrawals were shattering, and he got jumped and stabbed by other inmates. His time inside left him with post-traumatic stress disorder, he says, and it exacerbated his anxiety and other symptoms of trauma. Amid all his legal troubles, Chavez was still suffering from chronic pain. In nine years, he was hospitalized 12 times. He was given pain pills every time.

Perez-Baron, the doctor in Questa, says programs to treat addiction have ignored underlying factors that lead people like Chavez into a cycle of failure. She believes prevailing cultural attitudes — which tend to link addiction with weakness of character — make recovery harder. “You have folks going through a revolving door of recovery and relapse, and the stigma that surrounds dependence and addiction distracts us from addressing some of the roots of the problem,” she says. Perez-Baron rattles off a list of “co-occurring conditions” that are often at the heart of addiction ― chronic pain, insomnia, trauma, attention-deficit/hyperactive disorder, depression, and anxiety.

If left untreated, these conditions (which are sometimes the initial cause of the addiction itself) often make it impossible for addicts to stay clean. Chavez says his pill dependence probably stemmed from trauma. But the roller coaster of addiction, and the additional baggage of prison time and failed relationships, made bucking the drug even tougher. In the maelstrom of opioid addition, Perez-Baron says there's no way to get at those deeper issues. Users are too frenzied to treat thoroughly.

Suboxone is prescribed to opioid addicts to relieve cravings and withdrawal symptoms. The drug is part of a comprehensive treatment model put in place at a rural clinic in Questa, New Mexico.

That's where Suboxone comes in. It's like a pause button. “If we're looking at long-term abstinence, the focus really has to be on the behavioral health and co-affective conditions,” Perez-Baron says. “Suboxone is what makes them able to stay plugged in.” Chavez knew for a long time that he was in trouble. And he wanted to be better. But the cravings sucked up any motivation to get well. “When you're an addict you're on the fence and it's hard to give 100 percent,” he says. “It's not that you don't want to be a better person or a sober person. You just don't have a choice.”

For years, Perez-Baron saw patients suffering from addiction one-on-one. She'd prescribe Suboxone and offer referrals to a therapist.

The approach was inefficient and ineffective. Individual appointments limited the number of patients she could serve. In a rural area ravaged by addiction, she couldn't meet demand. Plus, referrals to outside therapists forced patients to schedule yet another appointment, and doctors and therapists often failed to craft a customized approach to treat each patient. So in August 2015, the Questa clinic pioneered a new approach to treatment: group therapy. These days, Perez-Baron and Liz Sump, a licensed mental health counselor, meet once a week with around a dozen clients at a time. They do meditation and a therapy session with Sump, then go over medical issues with Perez-Baron. It's a model Perez-Baron developed after working in high-end residential treatment programs, the kind meant to treat doctors who find themselves addicted to opioids.

Providers look at nutrition, exercise, self-care, psychology, psychiatry and medicine. And they add a lot of oversight and build trust. Perez-Baron says she tweaked that “gold-standard” approach to fit an out-patient setting. “When you create a place for that, people get well,” she says. “So if we know what works, why can't we bring that here?”

For Sump, the model is a dramatic improvement over her previous work, which required chasing down doctors to learn about medical conditions that might impact her counseling. “It was hard to get them to tell me where their clients were at on a monthly basis, and that's if they wanted to talk to me at all,” Sump says.

The support group gives patients a safe place to share their experiences with others fighting the same battle.

“We're all parallel with each other,” Chavez says. “We relate to each other's feelings of hopelessness, pain, anger, and resentment. And we can talk about our cravings. Because we all have cravings.” The group model has also allowed the little clinic to increase its patient volume, by treating three groups of up to 14 patients. Patients face mandatory weekly urine tests to ensure accountability and honesty. Testing dirty does not mean a patient is kicked out of the program. Relapse doesn't mean weakness. It means treatments need tweaking.

This was new to Chavez, who would be locked up if he failed a drug screen while on probation. In January, off probation and new to the program in Questa, Chavez relapsed. But instead of being reprimanded, he got more support. “I don't care that you stumbled,” Perez-Baron says. “I care what you did immediately after that. Some folks stumble and they disappear and we never see them again. But the ones that come back, typically with that big pile of shame, those are the ones. That's where recovery happens.”

Although group therapy is the focus of the Questa clinic's model, Suboxone, and the relief from cravings that it provides, is also integral. Yet the drug is the subject of intense medical debate.

Fourteen years after it was approved by the FDA to treat opioid addiction, there's still little consensus on how best to use it. Should it be prescribed indefinitely, or should patients be forced to taper off? How much does counseling really help? And can patients who taper stay clean?

Various academic studies on Suboxone have shown mixed results. A notable 2011 study by the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network found that about half of patients treated with Suboxone and “standard medical management” were clean at the end of three months. But eight weeks after the treatment ended, only 9 percent of participants had stayed clean. The results did not change for a group that got additional counseling.

Dr. Gina Perez-Baron, a general practitioner at the Questa Health Center who treats addicts with a no-shame approach.

For her part, Perez-Baron is adamant that most studies on Suboxone have asked the wrong questions. She thinks it takes at least a year or two of intense medical and behavioral health treatment for addicts to get stable enough to taper off Suboxone with minimal risk of relapse. A study measuring who stays clean after tapering off in just three months is inherently flawed, she says.

Still, research like the 2011 study has taken some of the shine off Suboxone as a silver bullet for solving addiction. Some doctors argue Suboxone is just trading one drug for another. Others suggest long-term use can create its own addiction problem.

That danger is well known in Questa, where in 2014 a toddler suffered severe brain damage after he ingested a Suboxone tablet illegally obtained by his father.

To keep prescription Suboxone off the streets, participants in the Questa program can be kicked out if they're caught selling or giving the drug to anyone else.

John Hutchinson, a doctor of pharmaceuticals and director of health outreach with Holy Cross Hospital, has publicly weighed in on the ways Suboxone can be misused. But he also sees its potential. Hutchinson is an advocate for Suboxone combined with behavioral health therapy and mandatory drug testing ― exactly the model that's been put in place at the Questa clinic.

“It's beautiful,” Hutchinson says. “If you're going to use Suboxone, that's the way to do it.” Combining medical treatment and intensive therapy to combat addiction is gaining traction nationwide. Similar programs exist in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Such models are less common in primary care settings, like the Questa clinic. Hutchinson says Perez-Baron's program is especially impressive because it's happening in a rural, impoverished community. He says it took a “heroic effort” to get a dedicated therapist despite a lack of resources. The program also had to be available to Medicaid patients, who make up the vast majority of participants. “This is a big city service in tiny Questa,” Hutchinson says.

August 4 was Perez-Baron's last day at the Questa clinic. She recently took a job as medical director for Las Clinicas del Norte, which serves patients in Taos and Rio Arriba counties. She hopes to put the same treatment model in place there. The program in Questa will continue with a doctor who calls in via video conferencing. It's not yet clear when or if an in-person doctor will take over.

Running this kind of program in such an isolated area takes dedication from the doctor and therapist. Perez-Baron is unusually motivated. It might be tough finding a replacement. As a physician, Perez-Baron says the progress shown by patients in the program is incredibly rewarding. “I think if more doctors saw the reward, more doctors would be invested in it,” she says.

As with any intervention, gauging the effectiveness of the Questa program can be a challenge. Academic studies tend to focus on who stops using and for how long. Perez-Baron's measures of success go beyond absolute abstinence.

Clinical indicators show the program is working. There's been a 40 percent decrease in trauma as measured through a questionnaire. Depression rates are down 28 percent. And self-reported anxiety is down 4 percent.

Perez-Baron says these mental and physical benefits coincide with quality of life improvements. Of her female patients with children, 78 percent have been reunited with kids they lost because of addiction. Two patients have started their own businesses. Two more have gone back to school.

As she likes to quip: “It's a country song played in reverse.”

Some patients have also stumbled. Six have been arrested in the last 12 months. And four have gone to the ER in the last year because of illicit drug use. Perez-Baron says the ultimate goal of the Questa program is to get patients off Suboxone entirely. So far, Perez-Baron says only one participant has tapered completely off the drug without relapse. That's partly because the program has only been around a year and no one is pushing patients to taper. There's no timeline. No pressure.

It's a cautious approach, but Perez-Baron say it's necessary so patients have time to learn the skills to cope with life off drugs.

“I know there are those who would say I'm a fool for saying anyone could taper off of Suboxone,” she says. “But I'm willing to be that fool. And I'm willing to put that possibility in the hands of my patients by making them well-armed to make that choice.”

But can a treatment program that may last for years really survive in a rural clinic strapped for resources? Perez-Baron and her staff say the treatment model has not been especially burdensome, in part because the program isn't overwhelmed with patients.

While there's a rising demand for opioid addiction treatment in Northern New Mexico, a daunting application and intake process at the Questa clinic tends to weed out anyone who isn't committed . Even then, Perez-Baron says just 30 percent of those patients make it three months without dropping out. Some don't like the approach. Some have a hard time commuting to Questa, especially those who have to come from more than an hour away. Other just aren't ready to get clean.

Chavez, now in his seventh month in the Questa program, says the model works. He understands his addiction. He knows his triggers. He also knows the consequences of not getting clean.

For the first time, he says he's getting help from people who want to understand his addiction as well as he does. He says he's finally climbing out from a very deep hole.

“This program saved my life,” he says. “I've never wanted to help myself as much as I want to now because of these people. This is my sanctuary. This is where I feel safe.”

For him, the short-term benefits of Suboxone and therapy have been stability and peace of mind. Chavez says he's happy now. He's mended a torn relationship with his parents. He has a steady job and is taking on side work to pay off his debts. Last month, Chavez had his first real victory on his march toward recovery. He was back in the hospital because of more abdominal pain. The nurse asked him if he was on any medications. Chavez knew if he lied about Suboxone he'd get morphine. And he wanted it bad. But he didn't lie. He thought about how Perez-Baron and everyone at the Questa group would react to another relapse. He didn't want to let them down. And he used lessons from the program to overcome the craving.

Tabs of Suboxone are placed under the tongue to dissolve. Doctors are divided over the drug’s effectiveness, but those running the Questa program says it’s a critical part of mellowing an addict so they are receptive to mental and physical treatments.

Chavez felt proud in that moment of strength. But he was immediately reminded that small successes for a recovering addict are bittersweet. Twice now, he says nurses have completely changed their demeanor when they learn he's on Suboxone. They talk to him differently. They are less kind. Their attitude suggests they don't see him as a patient, but as an addict. That kind of judgment means Chavez and others in the group have to hide in the shadows, even after they've emerged from the darkness of addiction.

Some recovering addicts have lost jobs when employers learn they're on Suboxone. Patients in the Questa program know that being open about their recovery can also hinder it. So their triumphs get muted. A small conference room in the Questa clinic is one of the few places where they can celebrate their recovery. Chavez is adamant that he wants to taper off Suboxone. He's already cut his dose in half since starting the program. But he's not rushing into it. For him, it's important to know he's not tied to any drug.

“Free,” he says. “I want to be free.”

]]>No publisherSmall towns, big changePublic healthNew MexicoPeople & PlacesSouthwestNot on homepage2016/08/08 03:20:00 GMT-6ArticleRural New Mexico hospitals pool resources to survivehttp://www.hcn.org/articles/rural-hospitals-team-up-to-survive-new-mexico-rural-health
Will a new network be the difference for remote hospitals on the brink of financial collapse?Guadalupe County Hospital in Santa Rosa is home to the only emergency room between Albuquerque and Tucamcari — a 173-mile stretch of Interstate 40 that spans the lonely eastern half of New Mexico. The small city is home to less than 3,000 people, making it the largest town in a county with less than 5,000. More than a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line.

For Guadalupe County’s isolated and scattered populace, the hospital plays a critical role.

In New Mexico, this scenario — a remote hospital struggling to serve a poor community — is all too common. According to federal data, one-third of the state’s population lived in “Health Professional Shortage Areas” in 2010. Thirty-one of New Mexico’s 33 counties faced shortages.

Like most rural hospitals in the state, Guadalupe County has to fight to get by. Many of its patients rely on government health insurance, which often doesn't cover the hospital's costs, let alone provide a profit. That situation is only expected to get worse as the state faces a $417 million Medicaid shortfall.

At the same time, the needs are overwhelming. New Mexico often finds itself near the bottom of nationwide lists related to health and wellbeing. America’s Health Rankings, for instance, placed the state 37th in 2015, partly due to high rates of diabetes, drug deaths, and children living in poverty.

To better counter those challenges using its limited resources, Guadalupe County Hospital is teaming up with other small hospitals to share information, hire experts and offer advice on how to navigate an increasingly uncertain industry.

“We’re all facing the same thing,” Campos says.

In 2014, Santa Rosa and five other hospitals founded the New Mexico Rural Hospital Network, an initiative intended to improve cooperation — and, with it, fiscal health — among small hospitals scattered across the state. The network now contains 10 members altogether, including Holy Cross Hospital in Taos.

“All of our hospitals are the only hospital in their town, sometimes even in their whole county or beyond,” says Stephen Stoddard, the network’s executive director.

Steve Rozenboom, CFO at Holy Cross Hospital in Taos, has participated in 'peer committee' meetings with others doing the same job and small hospitals across the state. Staff members say these quarterly meetings are a great way to share good ideas.

Katherine Egli

The group’s creation was aided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which regularly funds rural hospital networks to improve efficiency, expand access and improve quality of care. In its most recent round of funding two years ago, the agency awarded a total of $11.6 million to 39 networks nationwide, from Alaska to Maine. The New Mexico network received a $300,000 grant.

“Generally, the purpose of these hospital networks is to focus on helping them thrive,” Stoddard says. “But in the case of New Mexico, it’s to survive.”

In some cases, that means creating economies of scale. For example, the network gives its members more leverage when buying supplies; one network in North Carolina helped save its members more than $20 million from 2002 to 2007. In New Mexico, some member hospitals have entered into group purchasing agreements, lowering prices on bulk purchases for necessities like bandages and bedpans. Guadalupe County Hospital has already cut its annual supply costs by nearly one-third, from $100,000 to $70,000.

But Stoddard says the real strength of the network is in building relationships and exchanging ideas. To that end, he has organized quarterly “peer committee” meetings where employees doing the same job in disparate hospitals get together to talk shop.

“In an urban environment, there are lots of opportunities to collaborate and share ideas,” Stoddard says. “But in a rural setting, you’re often very isolated.”

Before the network’s creation, says Campos, the CEO at Guadalupe County, “If you were a medical records office manager, you were the only one you knew. Now you have nine others that you can call on.”

That might sound simple. And obvious. But Stoddard explains that staff in small hospitals suffer professional isolation that can hurt their performance and stifle innovation. And without a formal network, conversations that inspire learning and creativity — and, in turn, lead to cost savings — usually don’t happen.

That was true for Leslie Sanchez, who oversees medical records at Guadalupe County Hospital and has been part of the network’s committee meetings for about a year. “It was just nice to be able to hear their experiences and their problems and realize ‘Wow, I’m not the only one going crazy,’” Sanchez says.

Sanchez says one of her greatest challenges is getting doctors to finish paperwork, so she can code procedures and submit them for payment. If that paperwork doesn’t get done, the hospital doesn’t get paid.

According to Sanchez, another records clerk in Lovington has experienced the same problem. So he developed a series of emails to prompt doctors to complete paperwork. It was a simple approach, but it was more structured, Sanchez says. And it works much better than her strategy of gentle nagging.

The network has also hired its own specialist to analyze contracts with insurance companies to ensure that terms are fair and comparable to other hospitals. That kind of expertise would be hard for any one of these hospitals to afford on their own.

Furthermore, the network is working with the University of New Mexico to draw more medical students to do rotations in rural hospitals. Studies have found that attracting a medical student to a small hospital makes it easier to later hire them when they finish school. Although many of the ten hospitals have previously tried to combat retention problems on their own, the existence of the network gives these small facilities more to offer medical students, Stoddard says.

For all the group’s accomplishments, its success remains tenuous. It's not clear whether cooperation and bulk purchasing will be enough to keep small hospitals viable. But network members say it can't hurt.

In the short term, the big concern is whether this nascent network can survive after its federal grant funding runs out next year.

“That’s the question,” says Bill Patten, CEO of Holy Cross Hospital in Taos. “How do we achieve sustainability? We don’t want to develop a network if it’s just going to end after three years.”

According to Patten, the decision to join the network a few months ago was “low risk.” Holy Cross gets all sorts of benefits for basically no cost. Each hospital now pitches in a few thousand dollars. But it will take much more to keep the network running. The good news is that a 2012 study found that 83 percent of rural health networks were still in operation two to four years after losing their federal funding, thanks in some cases to small state grants that picked up the slack.

If the network can prove its worth to its members, they might be willing to shell out more money or find funding elsewhere — and face these challenges as a group, rather than going it alone.

]]>No publisherSmall towns, big changePublic healthNew MexicoCommunities2016/06/30 03:00:00 GMT-6ArticleHow rural New Mexico shares water during droughthttp://www.hcn.org/articles/can-rural-new-mexico-offer-water-sharing-solutions-during-drought
Centuries-old traditions offer guidance for water managers seeking resilience in an uncertain future.Norbert Ledoux beams with pride when he sees his acequia brimming with spring runoff on a sunny May morning.

Ledoux, a young farmer from Talpa, has 2 acres of beans, peas and other vegetables planted. Water in the ditch likely means a bountiful harvest. Enough crops to feed his friends and family, with plenty left over to sell at his roadside farm stand.

“This year, we have a such an abundance that we can’t possibly use it all,” says Ledoux. “Everybody is content.”

Acequia farmer Norbert Ledoux, photographed at his two-acre garden near his home south of Taos.

J.R. Logan/Taos News

Three years ago, things weren’t so cheerful.

On this same day in 2013, there was less than one-fifth the flow in this stream, the Río Grande del Rancho, which feeds more than a dozen other acequias — community-operated irrigation ditches that double as political subdivisions in New Mexico. By the middle of June, there was almost no water at all. Amid that devastating drought, acequia leaders revived a water sharing agreement originally drafted to weather the brutal drought of the ‘30s.

At the time, Ledoux was a mayordomo – a ditch boss who monitors and manages an acequia. He says that first deal was struck to help the whole valley get through the dry spell.

“Everybody was losing their crops,” Ledoux explains. “So a few ancestors of mine – uncles of mine and my grandfather – got together with the mayordomos and implemented this water share project.”

Under the deal, each ditch agreed to take turns diverting the bulk of the river’s flow. Acequias are fed by gravity, and it’s hard to push water to fields and gardens when the river just doesn’t have enough oomph. By taking turns and using the water only for gardens and orchards, acequia users 80 years ago could make the most of the trickle and still grow enough food to survive.

When the sharing agreement was reinstated three years ago, Ledoux was responsible for deciding who got water and when. He says the sharing model worked, even if plenty of irrigators felt they were getting shortchanged.

But Ledoux says sharing water has always been customary. Taking more than your fair share would have simply been wrong. This notion of sharing is not intrinsic to water law in the American West. In fact, it’s just the opposite. But some believe the collaborative approach modeled by the acequias is a more logical and sustainable way to administer water in an increasingly challenging environment.

Most Western states, including New Mexico, have water law founded upon the notion of “prior appropriation,” legal jargon that loosely translates to “first come, first served.” Under existing law, each water user is assigned a water right that includes a “priority date” meant to reflect when water was first put to some kind of use. If your priority date is older than your neighbor's, you get first dibs when there’s not enough to go around ― even if that means leaving your neighbor dry.

It’s an antagonistic system that pits water users against one another. “It does create essentially a caste system, a hierarchy,” says Adrian Oglesby, a water law attorney and director of the Utton Transboundary Resources Center at the University of New Mexico. When water is scarce, some people win and some people lose.

Oglesby says the priority date system has its advantages. For instance, priority dates add certainty for farmers. If it’s shaping up to be a dry year, those with older water rights have some assurance they’ll get the water they need, and those with junior rights can prepare to go without.

While other states routinely cut off junior water rights holders, Oglesby points out the “harsh reality” of a priority call is almost never used in New Mexico. In part, that’s because New Mexico’s system for water administration is considerably less sophisticated than those of other states, making priority calls much harder to enforce.

Also, Oglesby says New Mexico water users themselves often come up with voluntary agreements, as Ledoux and the acequias in the Ranchos Valley did. Such resource-sharing agreements bypass the need for a priority call.

Proponents of the collaborative, community-based approach fostered by acequias argue such negotiations add a human element to the cold, inflexible logic of the priority date system. Within the acequia system, sharing is fundamentally rooted in the cultural notion of “auxilio” ― helping when others are in need.

“For a lot of people, it’s inconceivable that they would receive water at the expense of their neighbor,” says Paula Garcia, executive director of the New Mexico Acequia Association (NMAA). “It just seems very counterintuitive to the concept of an acequia.” In fact, state law includes language that offers flexibility to acequias so they don’t have to strictly adhere to the priority date system.

Sylvia Rodriguez, professor emerita of anthropology at UNM, believes the acequia model is more conducive to sustainability and resilience in a semiarid climate afflicted by frequent scarcity.

“We have the wrong world view here in the West, the idea of unlimited expansion, and it just doesn’t work,” she says. “I think land-based people who generally live on a small scale know that there’s a limited good. The basic idea is that shortages are shared.”

But can the acequia system endure the vagaries of Western water law? While acequias enjoy relatively senior water rights, some users worry urban areas will still get their way if water managers are ever forced to choose between shutting off cities or rural farmers. There are also fears that acequia water rights will eventually be bought up to feed urban centers downstream, leaving Northern New Mexico farmers dry.

For years, Garcia and the NMAA have advocated for the acequia model of cooperation as a way to resolve conflicts on a grander scale. They hope the same approach could avoid scenarios that end with clear winners and losers.

Other districts offer some evidence that a collaborative approach can work. The same year the Ranchos acequias agreed to share water, ditches up and down the Río Chama, including some of the oldest acequias in the state, struck a similar deal. By agreeing to a rotating schedule, the acequias managed to avoid a priority call that could have left as many as 14 of the 17 ditches in one acequia association dry.

“In times of shortages, people have to get together,” says Fred Vigil, chairman of the Rio Chama Acequia Association, which was part of the agreement.

Both the governor and the state engineer pointed to the Chama agreement as a model for cooperation to get through the years-long drought. But even the best collaborations rarely result in unanimity, and not everybody on the Chama ended up thrilled with the deal.

On July 25, 2013, David Ortiz walked into the State Engineer’s Office in Santa Fe and asked to make a priority call. Ortiz is a parciante, an irrigator with water rights, on the Chamita Ditch, which has a priority date around 1600 and is among the oldest non-Native American water rights in New Mexico.

Ortiz tried to hand over a letter and petition demanding water users upstream be cut off. State officials refused to accept the documents and said that because of the water sharing, the Chamita Ditch was receiving its full allocation of water. Before the issue could be resolved in court, the summer monsoons hit. Ortiz withdrew his request.

Though the priority call was rendered moot, the episode highlighted the discord that can linger around even the most harmonious acequia. John Fleck, formerly a reporter with the Albuquerque Journal, wrote about the Ortiz incident for a front-page column in August 2013.

During the worst of the drought, Fleck says he was surprised to find several examples of voluntary cooperation. Fleck just published a book ― “Water is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West” ― that highlights successful collaborations for managing water up and down the Colorado River Basin.

Prior appropriation law might set the stage for a battle royal, but in most cases, Fleck says, the fight never materializes. Instead, they sit down and compromise.

Fleck says the basic principles behind water sharing among acequias already exist on a much larger scale. He points to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves about 19 million people in 14 cities. On paper, those coastal urban consumers compete for water with the Palo Verde Irrigation District, which serves farmers who own senior water rights and who grow crops on the other side of the state.

In 2004, the two districts reached a deal under which farmers could be paid to fallow land, allowing water that would have gone to irrigation to flow instead to coastal homes and businesses. Taps keep flowing in Southern California cities, farms remain financially viable, plus the farmland is still available for wetter years.

“It’s a hard-nosed business deal, I guess. But it’s also neighbors sharing with each other in this collaborative structure,” Fleck says.

Fleck says these partnerships go largely unnoticed because they’ve managed to avoid the conflict narrative that dominates discussions in the region. By approaching the issue more optimistically, Fleck hopes to build momentum for new, more creative collaborations. “It’s really important that we nurture those and pursue them,” Fleck says, noting that climate change and continued population growth will likely make water management in the Southwest more challenging.

If cooperation-minded approaches do become more common, water managers might look to the acequias for guidance in crafting models that emphasize sustainability and community survival.

]]>No publisherSmall towns, big changeWaterPeople & PlacesNew MexicoColoradoCommunitiesNot on homepage2016/05/26 13:00:00 GMT-6ArticleLocal woodcutters pitch in on forest healthhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/from-adversaries-to-allies-in-the-fight-for-forest-health
How mobilizing a small army of locals could nurture grassroots support for large-scale thinning efforts.Henry Lopez moved to Peñasco in 1972 after marrying a local girl. The rural mountain valley in Northern New Mexico was only a drive of a few hours from where he grew up south of Albuquerque. But culturally speaking, it was another planet.

“I didn't even know how to run a chainsaw when I got here,” Lopez says, chuckling at his youthful ignorance. That kind of mechanical illiteracy is a cardinal sin in the area, where wood gathering is a basic part of most people's lives.

In the mid-'80s, Lopez joined the U.S. Forest Service and got assigned to the office in Peñasco. Locals had the instinctual habit of giving the finger to anyone driving a green government truck. They didn't trust the feds. They had no faith that they were acting in the community's best interest.

Lopez managed to get past some of that wariness and used his understanding of local culture and needs to create a nationally recognized program now known as “Collaborative Stewardship.” Instead of offering big timber sales to outside contractors, Lopez helped craft a program to offer small plots of forest — a couple acres called a “stewardship block” — from which locals could gather wood and feel a sense of forest ownership. At the same time, the Forest Service was being paid a small fee to get some much-needed tree thinning finished.

Today, with the Rio Grande Water Fund aiming to restore hundreds of thousands of acres of forest while benefiting local communities, Lopez's program could be a useful tool in building grassroots support.

Henry Lopez, left, and Camino Real District Ranger Tammy Malone inspect an area of Carson National Forest that's slated for tree thinning. This area has been divided into blocks that will be sold to locals who cut down and haul out any trees not marked with orange paint.

Photo by Katherine Egli, The Taos News

The innate distrust of outsiders among Peñasqueros comes from a long, sordid history of chicanery and exploitation.

Most of these tiny hamlets in the rolling foothills of the southern Sangre de Cristos were settled hundreds of years ago. Hispano pioneers relied on land grants — vast tracts of land presented by the Spanish crown — for their survival. Rivers for irrigation. Valleys for farming. And the mountains for firewood and building materials. In many cases, residents shared common access to these resources.

But when the territory became part of the U.S., many land grants were cut up and sold off. Anglo outsiders often logged the best timber off the mountains. By the early 1900s, much of the land had been absorbed by the Forest Service, which strictly regulated access to resources.

Local Hispanos still feel a deep sense of betrayal for the loss. That lingering animosity informed Lopez's stewardship block program. Almost everyone in the dozens of communities near Peñasco heats their homes with wood, and some still use it to cook. Wood is a a necessity.

But the Forest Service has struggled to meet the demand. What's worse, when Lopez joined the Carson National Forest, most of the logging was done by big, out-of-town contractors who swept in, hauled off huge quantities of timber and left locals sifting through scraps.

“It got to the point where the communities were very opposed to big operations coming in,” Lopez says. “They have to be part of it. They don't want somebody to just come in from Idaho or somewhere and do the job and take off.”

After several large timber projects were halted in the early '90s by opposition from locals and environmental groups, Lopez and his boss revamped their approach. The stewardship block program was developed as a way to connect wood-hungry, chainsaw-wielding locals with forests that were in bad need of some tidying up.

When the Forest Service identifies an area it wants to thin, it can choose from a number of methods to get the work done.

Lopez says the most efficient way is to hire a big thinning contractor. There's less paperwork and administrative cost, and these companies are set up to do the work quickly and in a cost-effective manner. But in Northern New Mexico, this approach is also the least popular among the communities. Sometimes wood is left for locals to gather, but most jobs go to outsiders, and there's a sense that locals could do the work better.

Another approach to get thinning done has been to set up a “green fuelwood area.” The Forest Service marks the trees that can be cut down, and they open the area to anyone lucky enough to get one of the limited permits. The trouble is these areas get chaotic and outright dangerous as wood hunters scramble to get to the best wood first and get as much as they can.

The Collaborative Stewardship program resolves a lot of those issues. The Forest Service divides a thinning area into two- or three-acre plots, then sells those plots to an individual or family. Experts mark the trees they want left standing to maintain a healthy forest, and the block owner has a year to clear out the rest.

Lopez says stewardship blocks — now dubbed “partnership blocks” — could never be the only tool the agency uses for thinning. But he does think the program could be scaled up significantly.

Local woodcutters like the blocks because there's no rush and no competition, and they're assured that they'll have wood. Plus, many block owners end up feeling like they're keepers of the forest, not just visitors.

“It gives us a huge amount of ownership,” says Douglas North, 65, who lives in the village of Las Trampas. “When I cut down my block and I go back and look at it, I take pride in that I did the job for the Forest Service and I got to keep all the wood.”

North married a local woman and moved to Las Trampas decades ago. He says he needs 10 cords of wood each winter to heat his house and his son's house next door. He says he's relieved to have another block this year. It means he won't have to scrounge.

On early mornings this summer, North's brother-in-law, Alex Lopez (no relation to Henry Lopez), will go off with his brothers and nephews to work on his block, too. Over the coming months, they'll haul out piñon and ponderosa pine for firewood and juniper for fence posts.

In all, Lopez expects to get as much as 25 cords of wood by the time he's done.

Lopez is exactly the kind of person the Forest Service and Rio Grande Water Fund need to get on their side if they hope to build community support around large-scale thinning projects. He's an active member of the acequia and domestic water users association, and he's also helping reorganize the Trampas Land Grant board to lobby for more control of former land grant acres now managed by the federal government.

“We feel hurt when it comes to discussing how our ancestors lost this land,” Lopez says. But he says the stewardship block program helps heal some of those wounds.

“We feel like we're helping manage our forests,” Lopez says. “It seems like we have to train these district rangers as to our culture and what we really need. It's in the baby stages now, but we're working in the right direction.” Expanding the block program would help sustain that momentum, he says.

For 40 years, Nancy Buechley and her husband, Larry, have also gathered wood to heat their home in nearby El Valle. She says their love of the annual tradition goes beyond just the practical need for firewood. “I like the connection between doing the work and receiving the benefit,” Buechley says. “I like the feeling of being out in the woods and feeling like you're doing something valuable.”

Buechley says skeptics of the program have also come around after seeing the results. In places where blocks were cut years ago, grasses have rebounded. Scrawny trees have grown robust. The forest looks healthier.

Despite the support, the block program is far from perfect. People sometimes help themselves to the bigger trees that were supposed to stay standing. Others refuse to pile slash, meaning the Forest Service has to clean up after them. Some parts of the forest simply aren't appropriate; there might be limited access, or the existing wood might not be of much use.

The need for oversight of dozens of block holders also means the program requires more staff and more paperwork. It's a big reason the program has struggled to expand. The waiting list for people wanting to buy a block sometimes has as many as 100 people. The Forest Service says it hasn't had the manpower to support all the demand, though some locals wonder if that has more to do with a lack of willingness rather than resources.

If the Rio Grande Water Fund does manage to gain traction and much larger swaths of the Carson National Forest are marked for thinning, there's a small army of locals in southern Taos County with pickups and chainsaws who'd get behind the work if it means more blocks.

]]>No publisherSmall towns, big changeForestsNew MexicoU.S. Forest Service2016/05/26 13:00:00 GMT-6Article(Manmade) snow is for fighting over http://www.hcn.org/issues/45.4/climate-change-turns-an-already-troubled-ski-industry-on-its-head/manmade-snow-is-for-fighting-over
In an increasingly arid West, snow-making becomes a more important component of a ski area’s operating plan. But they need water to make snow, and getting it isn’t always easy.Sipapu Ski and Summer Resort is tucked into a narrow valley above the northern New Mexico village of Peñasco. As ski areas go, it's minuscule, with less than 5 percent of the skiable acreage of Vail. Yet Sipapu has built a reputation by consistently being the first resort in New Mexico to open for the season in mid-November.

Nature, however, doesn't always cooperate by delivering snow in time, so Sipapu depends on manmade snow. "The pressure is to get it open, and snowmaking is our insurance," says John Paul Bradley, Sipapu's manager, who sports a scruffy beard and spends nearly every waking moment during the early season tending to snow guns. The guns blast a mixture of compressed air and water over the slopes, and the droplets freeze when the temperature's low enough and humidity's right. This fall, the resort spent $80,000 -- a substantial investment for such a small ski area -- installing new equipment to make its snowmaking more productive. But more snowmaking requires more water, which requires finding and buying rights to that water.

Sipapu currently can divert some 5.9 million gallons each year from the Rio Pueblo, a tributary to the Rio Grande. That's barely enough to get the mountain ready for Christmas during snowless winters, says Bradley. So, like many Western ski areas, Sipapu is now hunting vigorously for more. Last September, the resort filed an application with the state asking for 350 acre-feet, or about 114 million gallons, of additional water rights on the Rio Pueblo.

Sipapu plans to offset the added diversion with water bought at auction from the Jicarilla Apache Tribe. But there's a catch: That water originates in the San Juan River Basin, is diverted through a tunnel under the Continental Divide and put into the Chama River where it finally enters the Rio Grande. That means the transfer would result in a net loss for the Rio Pueblo for 25 miles, from the ski area to the river's confluence with the Rio Grande.

Robert Templeton is a commissioner on an acequia (irrigation ditch) downstream from Sipapu. Templeton acknowledges the ski resort's local economic benefits, but he also doesn't want to see the environment sacrificed for more ticket sales. While the manmade snow eventually melts back into the watershed, Templeton says additional runoff in the spring does nothing to make up for diversions done in late fall when the river is at its lowest.

In the last 40 years, Templeton has seen the watershed struggle with an increasingly arid climate: Irrigators have to ration longer into the growing season, domestic wells have gone dry, and many are worried about the overall ecological health of a river that sometimes shrinks to a trickle. During dry years -- like the last two -- a big diversion by Sipapu could force a showdown between water-rights holders up and down the river. "We're looking at a dwindling resource, and there are going to have to be difficult questions asked," Templeton says. "I think we're coming to a time where push is coming to shove."

Region-wide water stockpiling of this sort has raised questions about whether ski areas are assuming too much clout in an ever-drying region –– especially as it becomes obvious that increased snowmaking is only a temporary solution in a warming climate.

In December, the ski industry won a major fight against the U.S. Forest Service when a judge struck down a provision that would have taken water rights away from resorts that operate on national forests and given them to the federal government. The Forest Service, which wants to keep water tied to public lands, fears that ski areas may start selling off their water rights if that becomes more profitable than the ski business itself.

It's not a far-fetched scenario. "We're getting kind of to the edge," says Glenn Porzak, a Boulder, Colo., attorney who supported the ski areas against the Forest Service. Porzak says that most competing water users have so far been able to compromise, but it's getting harder. Water rights are an increasingly scarce and valuable commodity, and interstate water allocations are stretched to their limits.

Some resorts are trying novel methods to solve the problem. Heavenly Ski Resort in California has computerized its snowmaking operations, making them more efficient by allowing crews to remotely turn on snow guns instantly, and only when conditions are optimal. Loveland Ski Area in Colorado captures manmade snow as it melts and stores it in an offsite reservoir to be reused in future snowmaking.

Other methods have been more controversial. This season, Arizona Snowbowl near Flagstaff began using treated effluent from the city's wastewater plant for snowmaking on a mountain considered sacred by several Native American tribes. The resort calls the approach an "environmentally and economically responsible decision," but it prompted fierce protests and lawsuits from environmentalists and tribes.

If the ominous predictions of climate change prove accurate, ski towns will likely see more of this kind of friction. It may come down to a painful choice: Keep the snow on the ski slopes, or have water in your faucets and irrigation ditches.

]]>No publisherClimate Change2013/03/04 00:00:00 GMT-7ArticleTroubled Taos, torn apart by a battle over historic Hispano land grantshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/44.14/troubled-taos-torn-apart-by-a-battle-over-historic-hispano-land-grants
A New Mexican town known for its art scene is home to a fractured community, where distrust of Anglo newcomers plays out in a fight over whether ancient deeds give Hispano old-timers a right to land.Taos, New Mexico

On a cloudless June day, Ernest Romero and I are parked on a ridge top in front of a home that gazes out over scenic northern New Mexico. The 2,200-square-foot adobe sits on three acres of piñon forest and is quintessentially Southwestern, with sand-colored walls complemented by sky-blue trim, wooden beams and red Spanish tiles. It’s for sale for $425,000.

The glorious view is a major selling point: Towering granite cliffs above, and, to the west, the Rio Grande Gorge slicing into the sage mesa. The snowcapped Truchas Peaks line the southern horizon. A few hundred feet below, a smattering of trailers and ramshackle adobes make up the 200-year-old, mostly Hispano hamlet of Valdez — just out of sight.

Many homes like this were built on this ridge by wealthy out-of-towners starting in the mid-’80s — back when Romero’s wife founded a real estate agency in Taos. Romero, the firm’s managing broker, has a full crop of white hair, light olive skin and a polished grin. He looks informally earnest in blue jeans and a collared shirt with pens in the breast pocket. A 10th-generation Taoseño, he’s also worked in the town government, run a community bank, and managed the local hospital. He’s serving as my guide to the tremendous changes of the last 30 years.

Romero sees a stark divide between longtime residents and the relative newcomers who are drawn by the dramatic scenery but know little about the local culture. “There is an absolute disconnect between (that house’s owner) and the Hispanic family that has been here for generations,” he says, gesturing at the house, which is mostly hidden behind a massive wood gate. “They don’t talk to each other. They don’t know each other. And that goes both ways.”

That disconnect is at the heart of a controversy that has gripped the entire community –– the latest chapter in a long-running dispute over who owns much of this valley and a good portion of New Mexico. The dispute dates back centuries, to when this territory was ruled by Mexico, and before that, Spain. It was resurrected in October 2010, when a group of five Hispanos — a term referring to descendants of the original colonial settlers — filed documents with the Taos County Clerk claiming 20,000 acres of private land, including the ground under the house where Romero and I are parked. The land is part of the Arroyo Hondo Land Grant, which the Spanish crown awarded to 45 families in 1815 to encourage settlement of the northernmost fringe of the colonial frontier. Among the documents recorded in 2010 was a genealogy going back to 1789, a land patent that was approved by Congress in 1908, and a warranty deed asserting that the entire grant belonged to the five members of the Arroyo Hondo Land Grant Board (the deed’s filers) and anyone else with a blood tie to the original settlers. Two months later, other activists on a different board filed similar documents, claiming rights to another swath of private land — the 22,000-acre Cristobal de la Serna Land Grant just south of Taos. That filing also included a patent, a genealogy and a warranty deed.

Once they became part of the public record, the activists’ warranty deeds began popping up whenever anyone tried to buy or sell any of the houses and lots within the 42,000 total acres, as title companies did standard title searches to verify ownership. They cast a cloud on all properties in both grants. Title underwriters got spooked, and many stopped issuing insurance policies altogether, so sellers couldn’t sell and buyers couldn’t buy. There are 12,800 properties within the old Serna and Hondo land grants, adding up to 35 percent of the county’s total property tax base. Suddenly, a pretty big chunk of the local economy was in limbo. Property owners and other residents on both grants (including many descendants of the original Hispano settlers) were incensed. The president of the Taos County Association of Realtors, an Anglo, called it “economic terrorism.”

It wasn’t long before lawsuits were filed to get the deeds off the books. The town of Taos sued the Serna grant board, and a state district court judge expunged that deed in just three months. Three national title insurance companies filed a joint suit in federal court more than a year ago to have the deed for the Arroyo Hondo grant cleared, but that case remains mired in legal maneuvering. A cloud still hangs over the Hondo grant.

The house Romero and I are visiting, listed for sale for the last six months, has been shown to potential buyers just twice. Even in a depressed economy, that is a serious lack of buyer interest, especially in such a desirable location. The activists’ move “has definitely had an effect on value. And it’s had an effect on the number of transactions,” Romero says.

The movement to revive the old land grants has flared up periodically for decades, making defiant statements of a superior right to lost land –– land that sustained local Hispanos for generations before it was taken or sold. The Taos deeds reveal that even the Hispano community is divided over how to address the old grievances. And much of the trouble is largely a reaction to what’s been going on in Taos lately. Most Taos Hispanos have no interest in something as arcane as land grants, but they are acutely aware of how the land that once defined their culture continues to be taken by Anglo strangers.

----

The original Hispano settlers struggled fiercely to eke out an existence in the 7,000-foot-high Taos Valley, dealing with wild swings in temperature and a scarcity of water. To promote settlement, beginning in the late 1700s, the Spanish crown granted large tracts of land to individuals, groups or towns in what became New Mexico. After the Mexicans threw out the Spanish rulers, the Mexican government issued more land grants. Many were “community” grants that included small private parcels for homesites as well as large areas held in common and used for grazing livestock or gathering firewood and building materials.

U.S. troops invaded Mexico in 1846, aiming to take control of California and the Southwest, and Mexico surrendered with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Though the treaty put much of Mexico’s Northern Territory (including New Mexico) into U.S. hands, it promised that hundreds of land grants and other Hispano holdings would be respected if their owners could prove the validity of their claims to the U.S. government.

It’s hard to say exactly how much land belonged to Hispano settlers and heirs; Congress eventually acknowledged almost 6 million acres of various land grants in New Mexico. But the process was sketchy at best. The U.S. government created the office of the Surveyor General, and then the Court of Private Land Claims, to confirm grants, but both were underfunded and plagued by corruption. Probably the worst example was Henry Atkinson, surveyor general from 1876 to 1884, who tried unsuccessfully to claim the 380,000-acre Anton Chico Land Grant, southeast of Santa Fe, for his own cattle corporation.

In the second half of the 19th century, the millions of acres of communal land on grants held by poor, Spanish-speaking villagers became easy targets for Anglo attorneys and speculators who used courtroom acrobatics and bribery to take over the land. Land-grant heirs were largely oblivious, as a good portion of the grants ended up in the hands of Anglo ranchers and logging companies. Common lands were often seized by the U.S. government as “public domain” and later absorbed by the fledgling national forest system. The Forest Service eventually enacted regulations and limits on use that irked many grant heirs who’d relied on the forests for generations.

When the heirs began to realize that they’d lost the land, they had little recourse. Records during the territorial period are spotty and imprecise, and the countless land sales and lawsuits amount to a rat’s nest of unscrupulousness. “It’s literally lost to history,” says David Correia, a land-grant scholar and associate professor at the University of New Mexico. “It’s a mess that we’ll never be able to unravel, so it becomes this flashpoint.”

The movement to assert Hispano rights to the old land grants took off in the 1960s. Texas-born, ex-evangelical preacher Reies López Tijerina blew into New Mexico’s rural villages, trumpeting about past injustices. He was a charismatic leader, and his message of loss and dispossession resonated with many poverty-stricken Hispanos. He organized grassroots opposition to state and federal authorities, called the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Land Grant Alliance), which quickly gained thousands of members. There were increasing conflicts between Hispano farmers and ranchers and the Forest Service over grazing, water and firewood rights on public land that once belonged to grant heirs, including episodes of arson and fence-cutting. The climax came in June 1967, when three carloads of armed land-grant activists stormed the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in tiny Tierra Amarilla, west of Taos. They tried to place the county’s district attorney, who sought to prosecute Alianza members, under citizens’ arrest. Two lawmen were wounded by gunshots, another was severely beaten, and the raiders escaped into the woods. A sympathetic jury found Tijerina not guilty of charges related to the courthouse raid, but he served two years in prison on other charges involving an attempt to take back national forest land. The resulting international attention put a spotlight on the land-grant movement.

Since then, the movement has evolved from a radicalized revolt to an institutionalized part of government. Juan Sanchez is president of the Chilili Land Grant Board, which manages 8,000 acres of common lands in the Manzano Mountains southeast of Albuquerque. He is also chairman of the New Mexico Land Grant Council, an agency of state government created in 2009 to help land-grant boards with planning and organization. In the last 40 years, Sanchez says, policy-makers have become more educated about past wrongs, and activists no longer use guns to seek justice. “We can’t do that no more,” Sanchez says. “There’s always confrontations in the land-grant movement, but those battles are taking place in court. It’s a different level than all the shooting.”

Activists pushed the Legislature to pass several laws in the last decade governing communal land-grant boards. There are now 33 registered with the New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office. The parcels they control range in size from as little as 15 acres to tens of thousands and are still used by heirs for grazing, firewood-gathering and hunting. The five-member boards are elected by heirs interested in using the common lands who can trace their heritage back to the original settlers. Usually, heirs must register with the board and pay minimal dues or fees for using the land. (Just determining the number of “heirs” can be impossible. I’m a great example: I grew up in Colorado; both of my parents are from South Dakota. But a few distant relatives on my mother’s side were New Mexican Hispanos, so I learned recently that I’m an heir to at least two grants near Albuquerque, and probably more.)

As government units similar to municipalities, land-grant boards are eligible for state and federal funds to manage common lands within the grant. Boards are steering taxpayer money to projects like riparian restoration and forest thinning. A land-grant legislative committee created in 2003 sponsors bills and doles out state funds to the boards. A program at the University of New Mexico focuses on archival research to retrace the boundaries of traditional common lands. The boards and heirs hope to use these maps to determine lost land and petition for its return.

In 2008, for example, 32 acres of former common lands that somehow wound up in state hands decades ago were returned to the Abiquiu Land Grant. Gilbert Ferran of the New Mexico Land Grant Consejo, which lobbies the Legislature on behalf of land grants, says the Abiquiu grant has about 75 member heirs who use its several thousand acres for grazing, timber and firewood harvesting, and hunting.

Nonprofits are also teaming up with land-grant boards to promote economic development. The Albuquerque-based Center of Southwest Culture is using farming, housing and eco-tourism cooperatives to revitalize rural, land-based Hispano villages on the Nuestra Señora del Rosario, San Fernando y Santiago del Rio de las Truchas Land Grant. Those heirs share thousands of acres of common land administered by the grant board, and small cooperatives — each composed of a few families — are allowed to use the land for a minimal fee to grow organic crops or guide trips into the neighboring Pecos Wilderness.

“Land grants are historically collective organizations, cooperative organizations, and they operate on the principle of community-based decision making,” says Arturo Sandoval, who heads the Center of Southwest Culture. “Co-ops are just a modern expression of a cultural phenomenon that’s been in place in New Mexico, through land grants and acequias (communal irrigation ditches), for the last 400 years.”

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Most of today’s land-grant boards are in remote areas where common lands haven’t changed much from a century ago. But in Taos, activists feel increasingly desperate in the face of a rapidly changing landscape. Former common lands are being devoured by development, while boards still struggle to organize.

As with most other grants, the histories of the Arroyo Hondo and Cristobal de la Serna grants are extremely muddled. On the Serna grant, alleged common lands were cut into narrow parcels called lineas and redistributed to heirs as a part of a tax survey in the 1940s. Lineas are sometimes only a few feet wide and miles long, and many families don’t even know which linea they own. Activists have long asserted that the lineas area was always used in common. Prior court rulings, however, have determined that the Serna grant was a private grant, meaning no land was ever held in common. On the Hondo grant, Anglo speculators and miners challenged the government’s original survey of the common lands, arguing that the cuchilla del cerro (ridge of the mountain) that served as a landmark for the grant’s eastern boundary in the original Spanish documents referred to a ridge in the foothills, not the mountaintops above. In the end, the government sided with the Anglos and left out about 10,000 acres that were subsequently picked up by the Forest Service.

The deeds for the Hondo and Serna grants were filed in the belief that they would lead to the return of lost land. Both boards were formed within the last three years and are registered as communal land grants with the state, but neither has any legal control over actual property. The Serna board recruited about a dozen heirs, who supposedly proved to the organizers that they had blood ties with the original grantees. That small group then voted in the current board members. The Hondo board members didn’t bother with an election. They appointed themselves, and it’s unlikely that there are more than two or three other heirs who recognize that board’s authority.

When the controversy over the warranty deeds erupted in early 2011, the Serna board backpedaled. Its members said they recorded the documents seeking publicity for their effort to regain control of the 7,000 acres of lineas that run in parallel tracts from the center of Taos toward Picuris Peak, 10 miles south. Without a precise survey, it was quicker to file a deed based on the 1903 patent for the entire 22,000-acre grant. Clouding the titles to thousands of private properties was an accident. “It went beyond what we thought it would do,” says Francisco “Comanche” Gonzales, a Serna grant heir who helped the current board file the deed. The whole bungled affair attracted plenty of bad press, infuriating many of the same heirs that the board needed to unite. The board now plans to start over from scratch. It has requested $150,000 from the Legislature to survey the lineas, but memories of the deed debacle make that an unlikely prospect.

The five members of the Hondo board — three of whom belong to the Ortiz family — are clinging to their questionable conclusion that the 1907 patent from Congress gives heirs perpetual title to the entire grant. While the patent says that the grant belongs to the “heirs, successors and assigns” of the settlers forever, the noun “assigns” is commonly understood to be anyone to whom property is sold or transferred — meaning that blood descendants could sell their individual parcels to non-heirs. However dodgy the deals might have been that wrested land from Hispano heirs, the language in the patent does not negate them.

After the Hondo board filed its warranty deed, an angry crowd of locals — heirs and non-heirs — turned up for the Hondo board’s next meeting to confront board members about their unilateral move to seize control of all of the properties. Some suspected that the deed was really a clumsy attempt to prevent foreclosure on a house owned by board member Lawrence Ortiz, who had defaulted on his mortgage. (The house was scheduled to be auctioned off the same day the Hondo warranty deed was recorded. No one placed a bid, and although a bank has since foreclosed, it’s been unable to sell the house because of the warranty deed.)

An unsigned letter posted at the Arroyo Hondo Post Office urged residents not to be intimidated by the “family board of trustees.” A highway sign announcing: “Entering Arroyo Hondo Land Grant” was spray-painted to read: “Entering ORTIZ Hondo Land Grant.” Palmela Reed-Ortiz, a sister of the three Ortiz board members, sued the board to disperse the cloud from a house given to her by her father. Yet her father’s signature appears on the warranty deed for the entire grant. During a deposition in that case, the 101-year-old father denied ever signing that deed. The district attorney in Taos, a supporter of the land-grant movement, has since charged Lawrence Ortiz with forgery and attempted fraud; he pled “not guilty” and awaits trial.

David Kramer, an Albuquerque attorney who represents Palmela Reed-Ortiz, says many land-grant heirs have legitimate grievances but need to follow state laws about forming boards, managing common lands and lobbying for funding and support. “The way to do it is certainly not to trick your dad into signing something that’s basically a sham deed,” Kramer says. “It seems like all of this, instead of being a genuine attempt to revitalize a land grant, just has a real flavor of self-interest.”

While some Hispanos think the controversy over the deeds was a black eye for the land-grant movement, others hail the deeds as a brave attempt to fight the unjust Anglo machine — ignoring the unsavory foreclosure and fraud details. “It did bring awareness and say that land grants are still alive in northern New Mexico, and this isn’t going to go away,” says Sanchez, at the New Mexico Land Grant Council.

The Hondo board tried to portray its actions as a continuation of the work the legendary Tijerina began 50 years earlier. Last summer, the board and a few supporters paraded Tijerina around the state to make appearances and give speeches. Now in his 80s, Tijerina received a hero’s welcome at most stops, and was even awarded the key to the city of Las Vegas, N.M. Tijerina’s appearance near Taos was more subdued. Breathing from an oxygen tank and hanging onto the passenger door of a white sedan, Tijerina spoke to a small gathering on the banks of the Río Hondo. His hair and beard were stark white, but his expressive eyebrows remained jet-black. Tijerina made no mention of the Hondo or Serna deeds. Instead, he launched into an anti-Semitic harangue in Spanish, asserting that New Mexican Hispanos were the true lost tribe of Israel. The small crowd was polite but underwhelmed by the rambling diatribe.

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Regardless of whether the activists were effective, they brought a new perspective to growth here. Taos’ isolation and beauty have long drawn urban Anglo refugees. Eccentric artists like D.H. Lawrence (an English writer and painter) and Georgia O’Keeffe (a New York refugee) found a wealth of inspiration in the valley’s unique people and landscapes beginning in the 1920s. In the 1950s, the steep, north-facing slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains drew German-born Ernie Blake, who used a single-engine airplane to scout the location for a ski resort, Taos Ski Valley.

Tourism really took off in the 1980s, driven by year-round recreation and cultural attractions, the most famous of which is Taos Pueblo, an Indian reservation whose ancient multi-storied adobe apartments stand at the base of particularly beautiful mountains. The Pueblo borders the town but is its own world. For the most part, the tribal government has an uneasy relationship with its Hispano and Anglo neighbors, and prefers to keep to itself. The Pueblo embraces tourism on its own terms, strictly controlling visitation, and in 1971, the tribe leveraged its mystique to persuade the U.S. government to give back one of its spiritual sites, 48,000 acres around Blue Lake, which had been absorbed by the Forest Service 65 years earlier. When President Nixon signed the bill to return the land, he said it was righting a past wrong. The irony isn’t lost on Hispano land-grant activists.

Tourism has attracted more outsiders who settle here, including many retirees. The county’s population jumped by almost 50 percent between 1990 and 2010 — from around 23,000 to almost 33,000, with almost all new development within a 10-mile radius of Taos.

To cater to the increasingly affluent crowd, Taos boasts luxuries not found in the average New Mexican town of 5,000, including pricy restaurants, yoga studios, spas and nearly a dozen espresso shops. Bumper stickers proclaiming “London — Paris — Tokyo — Taos” promote Taos as a cosmopolitan village. Romero says most people bought land and built vacation homes for the laid-back lifestyle that includes the skiing and the art. But despite touches of elegance, most of the community is still made up of Hispanos and Native Americans who live in modest, or impoverished, conditions.

“It’s like a Disneyland,” Romero says. “You go to Disneyland, and you enjoy being there. But you sure as hell don’t want to be Mickey Mouse.”

Taos native Sylvia Rodriguez sees the newcomers who visit or relocate as charmed by the veneer of a quaint, multicultural art colony. The reality, however, is very different. “A lot of people come here to get away from the city, but we have our own version of it,” says Rodriguez, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of New Mexico who earned her doctorate at Stanford. “This is a ghetto — a colonially structured society, even today.”

The same gulf between rich and poor, newcomer and longtime local, can be found in other Western resort towns, but here it’s complicated by racial overtones and the bitter property disputes epitomized by the land grants. The dichotomy between rich and poor was highlighted in a 2009 community health report by Taos C.A.R.E.S., a coalition of agencies and nonprofits: “It has been said that there are ‘two Taoses’ — one that is enjoyed by an affluent population that takes advantage of a lifestyle that includes luxury residences, expensive restaurants, skiing, a golf course, and a wide variety of cultural and artistic events, and one in which over 17 percent live in poverty, over 30 percent do not have health insurance and the median income is ‘significantly worse’ than the state average.”

Taos County also suffers drug and alcohol epidemics that disproportionately affect Hispanics and Native Americans, the C.A.R.E.S. report points out, and domestic violence is a problem in both groups. Public schools, which are predominantly Hispanic, are struggling. In 2009, only 41 percent of Taos High School seniors graduated. (New Mexico’s average that year was 66 percent — the nation’s third-worst statewide graduation rate.) The troubled public schools have spawned charter and private schools that, until very recently, drew mostly Anglo students and further segregated the community.

Rodriguez argues that these social crises derive from a long history of conquest and occupation. In 1680, Taos Pueblo and other pueblo tribes drove out the Spanish invaders, only to have them come back for good in bigger numbers and better armed. In 1847, right after the U.S. Army invaded New Mexico, a gang of Taos Indians and Hispanos rioted and murdered several Americans, including Charles Bent, the territory’s first U.S. governor. To longtime locals, this wasn’t so long ago. Rodriguez sees echoes in modern Taos, even though “all of this is swept under the rug in a sanitized facade that we have to present to the customers.”

The facade worked for many residents for a while. Taos County’s total economy nearly doubled from 1994 to 2008, mostly propelled by home construction and retail sales related to the newcomers. The boom provided many longtime Taoseños with a paycheck, but the growing pains have been agonizing. Service industry jobs are usually seasonal and low-paying, with no benefits. And construction work is unpredictable, a truth that hit home once the housing market soured in 2008 and hundreds of laborers found themselves unemployed. Romero tells me about the lack of jobs in the current recession as we wind our way along a narrow dirt road in a mostly Hispano neighborhood. A man and boy blast by us on a four-wheeler. Chickens wander in a trailer’s dirt front yard. A lot of Hispanos do whatever they can to get by, Romero says: “They’re getting a temporary job. Hustling this, hustling that. There’s no permanency.”

The spike in growth and the number of expensive homes has sent the cost of living soaring. A recent affordable-housing study found that the median home value in Taos County shot from $125,000 to $211,000 in the decade that ended in 2010. Fewer than 5 percent of county residents who rely on a local job for income could afford to buy a house at that price. One-quarter of the county’s population lives in mobile homes, while another quarter of the total housing units are second homes or vacation properties that are usually vacant. Many of Taos’ young people have left for cities like Denver or Albuquerque, where it’s easier to find steady work and affordable housing.

Ernie Atencio, former director of the Taos Land Trust and a former HCN board member, says many of Taos’ oldest Hispano families now find themselves land-rich but cash-poor. With economic pressures mounting, it’s becoming harder for those families that still own sizable lots to avoid selling out piece-by-piece. “The vast majority of traditional local families have a strong sense of stewardship and connection to the land. They would rather keep it open and intact, but it’s their only access to any sort of wealth,” Atencio says. “People talk so much about, and venerate, the land-based cultures of northern New Mexico. But the land base is disappearing. So what happens to the culture?” Today, very few young Hispanos show any interest in farming or ranching. Much of the irrigable land around Taos is now fallow or already developed.

Not only are new subdivisions overrunning agricultural land, sprawl and poor planning have strained public infrastructure and led to unbearable traffic problems in Taos’ narrow downtown. The result is a random patchwork of industrial zones, residential areas and strip malls that is a blight on the landscape and a threat to public health and safety. Efforts to shape development through planning have been largely unsuccessful, in part because of Taoseños’ innate distrust of government and outsiders. In February, the Taos County Commission held a week of public hearings on a proposed land-use code that would have, for the first time, imposed zoning. The fundamental goal was to curb the loss of historic farmland while establishing areas where businesses could thrive and create better job opportunities.

The code took years to draft. But on the final day of hearings, another crowd of angry Hispanos filled the commission chambers. Insisting they had been left out of the process, they argued that the new code was being pushed by newcomers who wanted to protect their own property values with little regard for traditional uses. The day-long hearing was filled with “us-versus-them” rhetoric, and the voices of supporters were drowned out by their belligerent opponents. Faced with turmoil, the commissioners, all middle-aged Hispano men, voted to drop the whole thing.

David Maes — a Hispano who grew up in Taos, spent his career in the Coast Guard, and came home to retire — helped draft the code. Given the long history of government and Anglo betrayal, Maes says it wasn’t hard for opponents to get the Hispano base stirred up. “These are people who have lived here all their lives, who have very few resources outside their land and culture,” Maes says. “These people feel very threatened about this growing and endless wave of newcomers that’s coming and engulfing their beloved Taos.”

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Miguel Santistevan, a 40-year-old farmer, educator and community activist, might represent a more promising path. Descended from original land-grant settlers, he can trace his lineage back to both the conquistadors and members of Taos Pueblo. Santistevan is unsmiling as he fulminates against the loss of the land grants and the hardships it’s created for his people.

“Look around. We’ve got seventh-graders snorting prescription pills. We have alcoholics before they graduate, if they even graduate. Potheads by 12 years old,” Santistevan says. “We’re a lost community. Why? Because we have no land base.”

Santistevan believes his ancestors’ way of life was lost with the land grants. The pastures and woodlands gave them their sense of purpose and identity. When that disappeared, the people began a downward spiral into violence, alcohol and drugs. Through his academic, agricultural and nonprofit work, Santistevan is hoping to break that cycle. He wants to reconnect troubled teens in his community with the subsistence farming tradition that was only rediscovered a couple generations ago. With funding from the Santa Fe-based Kindle Project, Santistevan goes from school to school, teaching classes on traditional farming practices and their contrast with industrialized agriculture. He recently received a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation to pay students who get their hands dirty cleaning ancient acequias and tilling soil once farmed by their great-grandparents. He even plowed up part of a football field at an elementary school to grow corn and other staples. It’s a tough sell, though, trying to convince headstrong teens to become modest farmers like their ancestors. Santistevan doubts he can reach most kids, but increasing interest in revitalizing local food systems could make small-scale farming feasible for some locals, and he could help them find this niche.

Santistevan’s home farm, Sol Feliz, is a single acre in the sleepy neighborhood of Cañon, just outside town limits. He raises chickens and fruit trees, and grows native beans, corn and squash using traditional flood irrigation. The farm is also his seed laboratory. He’s experimenting with plants that have acclimated to the microclimate of the upper Rio Grande over centuries, and has thousands of seeds in jars, including rare strains of lentils and sorghum, which he’s collected from elder Hispanos and coaxed out of dormancy.

Santistevan says he’s essentially carrying out the concept of the old land grants, on a smaller scale. “The land grant itself is the most viable model we have for sustainability, about how you related to the land, how you designate land use.” With several families relying entirely on the same land to survive, it was important to designate where to plant, where to graze and where to live. Each family took its share without exhausting the resource. Santistevan says this approach is vital if the old ways of farming are to be revived.

Like other Hispano activists, Santistevan sees some value in the land-grant deeds. They shook things up, forced people to remember past offenses. But he thinks that even a wholesale return of common lands would not solve the problems of Taos’ Hispano population. Besides, he has no desire to fight unending battles in the same courts that took away the land in the first place. He’d rather pull weeds or plow furrows in his backyard. An acre of land is more than enough to keep one family busy and fed, Santistevan says.

Driving back to his office through the summer gridlock, Romero lists other factors holding back the local economy. Being hours from the nearest interstate or commercial airport makes it tough to attract new industries. Resistance to change — in other words, the desire to preserve Taos’ authenticity — has delayed modernization. The Internet could open new doors, as the local electric cooperative is installing broadband for every home and business in Taos County, using $64 million in federal stimulus funds. That won’t quell the bitterness surrounding old land grants, though, and will likely accelerate the influx of newcomers looking for a beautiful place to live. Tourism and the second-home economy are keeping Taos afloat, and most Hispanos are just trying to survive in that reality rather than fight it.

Romero empathizes with the activists’ goal of using the deeds to reclaim the land that is slipping away, dragging what’s left of a moribund culture with it. They won’t give up, he says, but they’re fighting an almost impossible battle. Not only were the common lands on the Hondo and Serna grants dismantled decades ago, the enormous value of those lands now makes it far more difficult for activists to regain them from private landowners or the federal government.

The heirs who serve on working land-grant boards elsewhere in New Mexico have managed to hang on to a piece of their patrimony, yet even so, many are getting older or leaving rural villages. Traditional uses like grazing are carried on not so much to survive, but to honor custom. The successful boards achieve small victories and help their local communities, but more importantly, they are a symbol of Hispano pride: A validation of a people’s deep connection to the land, and a sign of control. In Taos, that control is all but gone.

This story was funded by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation.

J.R. Logan is a staff writer for The Taos News. This is his first story for High Country News.